Strip HTML and WORD formatting

[Nick1973]

Perhaps. I do see where you're coming from. And I don't disagree.

Here's my personal perspective on it though:
I never trust any Microsoft products to create reliable content for web pages. Been burned too many times. I just never use them, at least not for that.
For better or worse, it means I have limited exposure to those problems, and have little insight on the technical mess behind it. I've never understood why people insist on using the wrong tool for the job.
While sometimes the markup by CKEditor is less than perfect, it's a million times better than Word can do. It's designed for the web. Word was not.

One of the things that influences what makes it into the Zen Cart core is "who's gonna maintain" the feature. So, given that I never use Word for web stuff, I'm certainly not the guy to become the subject-matter-expert who will maintain that feature of the software as things evolve. There's already enough things that need more maintenance that get missed either due to amount of time required ... or subject expertise required.
That's why having people contribute plugins is helpful: those who are passionate about the feature and vested in keeping it current are the best contributors to such features.

No I totally agree with you. I never use microsoft products to make web pages since I am a developer. I run my own business developing websites in Wordpress or Zen Cart, and that requires knowledge. I would never go anywhere near MS Word or any other MS Products, apart from Excel which has its uses as a 'go between', when developing websites. The majority of them are clunky and spit out totally unnecessary code. I am almost passionate about not going near them too. However, try telling that to a car salesman, or a carpet fitter, or a builder, or a cake maker. Do you see where I'm going?

Many of them use MS Products and often make the mistake of copying and pasting content direct from Word, which in turn creates us developers a BIG problem when trying to format content in totally the same style throughout a whole website.

I don't claim to be an expert either at MS Products, and wouldn't want to be. I despise MS Products if anything. I agree with you on CK Editor, all I was saying is that it would be nice to have a slightly better feature in Zen Cart. I could go on and start talking about how other CMS and Ecommerce Systems have developed, but I stick with Zen Cart for good reason. I believe it is probably the best ecommerce software out there. It just needs a few tweaks here and there to bring it bang up to date. I'm sure thats happening from what I have seen in other threads though, and I appreciate you guys are under pressure to give us on the outside the best you can do. So I'm not complaining, but I do worry sometimes that it gets a little left behind in some areas, unintentionally. That isn't a complaint though as I appreciate developing these things takes up time, and there's never enough of that!

[DrByte]

Do you see where I'm going?

Yup. How'd the javascript work out?

[Nick1973]

I'll come back to this thread Next week, as I ran out of time yesterday to get heavily into trying this out. Leave this with me for a few days.

Oh and back to MS Products, I forgot to mention yesterday I'm on a Macbook Pro running Ei Capitan. The nearest I get to any MS Products now is Open Office, and for Database work I generally use Numbers if I need to work in a CSV. Up until last year I was on a slightly older Mac which did have MS Office installed, which I used, but rarely. It was mostly Excel if anything.

[mc12345678]

Not entirely sure what you mean, but I think probably your talking about a cleaner exported version of the data that could be imported back into the DB.

Guess I didn't see this last part of the message upon initial read. Made it just to this sentence before being distracted. (*squirrel*!!!)

What I meant was that EP4 which exports and imports data from and to the database (or vice versa) could be used to sanitize the description block data, if the javascript code provided either up front or later decided upon can be applied/rewritten for php use... The EP4 program has software hooks to inject code to perform desired action while processing the data from/to the database.

[Nick1973]

Ok do you have any suggestions on how to go about this...as in coding?

[mc12345678]

Ok do you have any suggestions on how to go about this...as in coding?

So, I just took a look at what the code posted in the first post of this thread does (didn't follow the link yet), and it basically does a regex replace on the associated data. This is a relatively straight forward process in php. I'd have to go back into the EP4 code to identify the applicable locations for taking action during the export, but I would suggest this action during some form of the full data export. Some form meaning there is a single clickable option from the main EP4 window, as well as the ability to export by smaller groups through the dropdowns at the top of the screen.

There is a branch off of EP4 that supports an additional product type called BookX that uses the notifiers in EP4 to accomplish the work designed by that programmer. There are some inefficiencies in that code, but the observer class (found in includes/classes/observers) shows examples of how to initiate the associated code at the related point in EP4. The code of EP4 has been structured to primarily have the necessary data in the global space, so variables needed to be modified can be brought into the applicable observer function, modified and upon exit will be equal to what was in the observer. Such variables are brought in by declaring global $var; where $var is the desired variable on which to operate.

The latest EP4 code can be found at https://github.com/mc12345678/EasyPopulate-4.0

[Nick1973]

So, I just took a look at what the code posted in the first post of this thread does (didn't follow the link yet), and it basically does a regex replace on the associated data.[/url]

Yes that is correct, it does a regex replace. I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about with EP4. Do you think it can be done though?

[kobra]

I'm not entirely sure what you are talking about with EP4. Do you think it can be done though?

As EP4 uses a csv file (excel, or openoffice) and that app has search & replace functionality far above what phpmyadmin has it is definitely something to consider...

I would install it either on your site or a test site locally or on a server.
Follow the instructions and download a csv and open it in one of the recommended applications
Try the search & replace being careful to to "find next" or "replace" as warranted
It is not fully automatic but for a modest investment of time you can clean up your descriptions in your entire database

Then in the future, only those additional entries will be suspect and need cleaning up